Reviews: Touno, Mamare

Log Horizon: The Beginning of Another World —
Mamare Touno
Log Horizon, book 1

Sloth is its own punishment. I could have gone across the room to the large box of books Resonant sent me [1] to select something to read. I could even have picked up either of the two books at the bottom of the stack of unread books nearest me [2] … but instead I picked up the 2015 English-language translation of Mamare Touno’s 2011 light novel Log Horizon: The Beginning of Another World. It was the book on the top of the nearest stack and it looked short.

~oOo~

The tale begins with a promised upgrade to a (fictional) MMORPG called Elder Tales, a popular online game, with 30,000 players in Japan alone and more world-wide. The developers promise to make an already interesting game even more fascinating. They live up to that promise in an unexpected way: everyone who was logged on when the upgrade went live suddenly finds themselves transported to the world of Elder Tales, trapped in bodies just like those of their player characters (which is to say hot, fit, and tingling with very special abilities).